This morning Jeff Pulver posted an entry in his blog about how VoIP will again be a disruptive force in 2008. He predicts that IP Communications, which is a natural extension of VoIP, combined with social media will engage consumers in the coming year and that this combination will start social communications revolution. As a response, Kfir Pravda suggests that the first stage will be based on two main features – Presence and Unified Address Book.

He further elaborates on these two features. For Presence, he is not satisfied with a simple notification. He would like to combine status information from multiple sources and be able to present different status information to different people “based on the level or type of connection”. This is what we have implemented in EnThinnai and we call it “Availability status”. Of course currently the process of combining multiple inputs is not automated, but that is our plan.

For Unified Address Book, he doesn’t want to differentiate between the connections in different social nets.

For me, I have only two considerations: who do I need to contact and in which format (synchronous voice conversation, voice mail, video conferencing, mail or IM). I don’t want to know what is his/hers “address” in any of these different means of communication. Who cares about telephone numbers, email address, IM nick names, and social networks entities? I just want to connect to the other person.

Right on Kfir. With EnThinnai, my buddies can access my Contact page get relevant communication mode and the associate addressing information. Indeed this information will be customized in accordance to his thoughts regarding Presence. With the Real Time Communication capabilities that we are planning to develop, my buddies will be able to directly communicate with me with out requiring to go to a third party application.

Kfir concludes his post with three open ended statements/questions:

“The one who would achieve that would change the way of communication as we know it.”

That is our expectation as well. Since our plan is to realize it in a distributed fashion, we are hoping that finally Jeff Pulver will say, “Indeed, you can be your phone IP communications company.”

“Can it be done by a simple company?”

We are a simple small company (it may not even a company, but we can handle complex thoughts and models). But we need your support, so please spread the word.

“How would Standard bodies affected and effected from this process?”

Even though we are spearheading this effort, in the final analysis the APIs needed to exchange data between multiple users (OpenSocial?) and the way to authenticate these exchanges (OAuth) need to be standardized.